Barricades in Tahrir Square

The protesters held Tahrir Square last night—at no small cost. This morning at daybreak, there were hundreds of people with bandaged heads, broken arms, taped noses. The battle for the wide northern entrance turned nasty in the small hours. Dr. Sherif Omar, a young man in a bloodstained white coat (“Look at me, I look like a butcher”), who had been at a mobile first-aid station all night, moving back and forth according to the shifting front line, described pro-Mubarak supporters throwing Molotov cocktails from the roofs of buildings and from the highway overpass opposite the square. “They were fewer, but they had the elevated positions,” he said. He described how the anti-Mubarak demonstrators had beat them back with a hail of stones, only to have the Mubarak people—“those mercenaries; we treated some and found crisp hundred-pound notes and police I.D.s in their pockets”—return with machine guns: “All the deaths were bullet wounds.” I heard different numbers of dead, none confirmed—five, six.

It was early morning, and Dr. Sherif was tired. A man came by offering sesame rolls and he took one. As we talked, rocks were still being thrown by the overpass; we could see them over the top of the makeshift barricade built of ripped-up street signs and pilfered metal fence, from around a construction site, and augmented by a bus that had tried to ram through the defenders last night but which had been captured. A general appeared, with a few soldiers as bodyguards. He seemed to want to see for himself what all the fuss was about. He was angry and strode into the first-aid station, a semi-cordoned section of street. Dr. Sherif asked him why the Army had not protected them the night before. The general said that he could hardly fire tank cannons on people—and that anyway this chaos was the work of foreign forces wanting to destabilize Egypt.

The general turned to a young man whose head was bandaged. With a gesture of fury, he ripped the bandage off, pointed, and said, “Look! It is just a bruise!” (I saw clearly there was a small patch of dried blood near the man’s hairline.) Then he ripped off another man’s bandage; this one did not come off easily, because it was stuck with dried blood. Then, just as suddenly, he kissed the man’s forehead and hugged him in a strange angry strangle and said that he wasn’t speaking as a general, but as just another Egyptian.

Dr. Sherif’s belief that many in the attacking crowd had been policemen in plainclothes appeared to be borne out. The protesters set up a small table and displayed dozens of I.D.s. At one point, a rugby scrum of protesters grabbed and manhandled someone they had found with a police I.D. “Don’t hand him over!” yelled someone in the throng. Over night, they had held captured policemen in the metro station before handing them over the Army, who then appeared to let them go. “Don’t hand him over, we should keep him!” “No!” one protester yelled back. “We’ll tie him to the fence.” Others shouted “Peaceful, peaceful” to try and calm the scene, and eventually those voices prevailed. The man was taken to a travel agency on the square; his shirt was ripped off and the words “POLICE OFFICER” were written in ink on his large and flabby chest. There was another captured police officer there, too, with his arms tied behind his back. I was told they would hold the big man probably until nightfall, because he was a senior officer. The other they would give to the Army.

The atmosphere in the square was one of relief, defiance, and grim anger. Several people told me that they had been mollified by Mubarak’s speech on television and had gone home, but that they were so disgusted by the violence overnight that they had returned, and would now refuse to be dislodged. Almost everyone in the square seemed certain that the arrival of the pro-Mubarak bands was a regime effort to push the protesters out of the square. Reports came throughout the day, too, that people on their way to the square were being stopped and harassed by police in uniform, and that supplies of food, medicine, and water were being confiscated. Tariq Amr, an engineer, said that a police officer, with an soldier standing for security nearby, told him, “You can’t bring those things to the traitors in the square—either you give them to me or you come with them, too.”

The protesting crowd, still a mix of old and young, and every demographic —women in Fendi sunglasses and ones in full veils, poor men and many professionals—has become more determined and more organized since the battles last night, although they are still working without any hierarchy and outside any party lines. Barricades now block every entrance to the square. In vulnerable places there are two or three lines of barricades, garbage has been swept into stripes to be set on fire as a defense, and burlap sacks of rubble are being held in reserve as ammunition. Some people had found hard hats, and a lucky few had motorcycle helmets; I saw several men with paint buckets on their heads as helmets, a few who had tied a strip of cardboard with a piece of string under their chins as protection, and some who were using circular traffic signs as shields.

During the afternoon, more people poured into the square and rumors became increasingly worrisome. I heard that the Hisham Mubarak Centre, an activist hub, from which I had reported earlier this week, had been raided and several lawyers arrested. Just now, someone called to tell me that a friend of mine, an Egyptian journalist, had been beaten up by thugs on the way home and handed over to the Army. The Army said they would ask him a couple of questions and then let him go. So far during these past days the actions of the Army have been confusing and ambivalent but mostly neutral. I am waiting for the phone call to tell me he’s all right, but it’s dusk and I can hear gunfire again, and see a tank rolling over a barricade.